Ruins as deterministic future: Bank of England

At the height of classical science Sir John Soane builds the Bank of England between 1792 and 1823, not only projecting the building but even his own decline and ruin, depicted in the watercolors of J.M. Gandy. It is evident that the projection of the process of a building turning into ruins through time is a mere utopia and the very natural becoming of architecture will be responsible for demonstrating it. In fact, from 1921 a series of selective demolitions were carried out at the Bank of England, which evidently will never coincide with the vision of a deterministic and reversible time of Soane and Gandy.

The Bank of England might well have been designed by the Laplace’s demon. The ruin was the fatal triumph of nature over man, the work of the Great Architect of the Universe. The one to which Sir John Soane aspired to be. Stability in architecture was a sign of its resistance to future transformation. The Bank of England ruins sought to show that the future could be predicted, leaving no room for evolution or indeterminacy. Buildings were closed systems that retain their qualities over time. Thus, duration was a proof of its immutability over time. But in the case of the Bank of England the ruin could also be understood as its expiration or obsolescence. And so, although planned in a reversible and deterministic way, the insight of Soane and Gandy was the beginning of an approach oriented to the future.